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Supreme Court unanimously rules that public officials can be sued for blocking critics on social media

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett Justice noted that the personal social media accounts of public officials often present an ‘ambiguous’ status because they mix official announcements with personal content.

The United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Friday that government officials who post about work-related topics on their personal social media accounts can be held liable for violating the First Amendment rights of constituents by blocking their access or deleting their critical comments.  

In a 15-page opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that the personal social media accounts of public officials often present an “ambiguous” status because they mix official announcements with personal content.

The court ruled in two cases where people were blocked after leaving critical comments on social media accounts of public officials.   

The first case involved two elected members of a California school board — the Poway Unified School District Board of Trustees — who blocked concerned parents from their Facebook and Twitter accounts after leaving critical comments.  

The court upheld the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that said the board members had violated the parents’ free speech rights.    

The second case before the court concerned James Freed, Port Huron, Michigan’s city manager who had blocked constituent Kevin Lindke from commenting on his Facebook page after deleting his remarks about the city’s COVID-19 pandemic policies.  

Lindke believed that Freed had violated the First Amendment by doing so and sued Freed.  

Freed maintained that he launched his Facebook page long before becoming a public official, arguing that most of the content on his account concerned family-related matters.  

Justice Barrett explained: 

Like millions of Americans, James Freed maintained a Facebook account on which he posted about a wide range of  topics, including his family and his job. Like most of those Americans, Freed occasionally received unwelcome comments on his posts. In response, Freed took a step familiar to Facebook users: He deleted the comments and blocked those who made them.     

For most people with a Facebook account, that would  have been the end of it. But Kevin Lindke, one of the unwelcome commenters, sued Freed for violating his right to free speech. Because the First Amendment binds only the government, this claim is a nonstarter if Freed posted as a private citizen. Freed, however, is not only a private citizen but also the city manager of Port Huron, Michigan — and while Freed insists that his Facebook account was strictly personal, Lindke argues that Freed acted in his official capacity when he silenced Lindke’s speech.

When a government official posts about job-related topics on social media, it can be difficult to tell whether the speech is official or private. We hold that such speech is attributable to the State only if the official (1) possessed actual authority to speak on the State’s behalf, and (2) purported to exercise that authority when he spoke on social media. 

In the end, the high court sent Lindke’s case back to the Sixth Circuit Federal Appeals Court for a second look.  

Perhaps reflecting continued ambiguity following the court’s ruling, both defendant Freed and plaintiff Lindke declared victory. 

“I am very pleased with the outcome the justices came to,” Freed told ABC News in a statement. “The Court rejected the plaintiff’s appearance test and further refined a test for review by the Sixth Circuit. We are extremely confident we will prevail there once more.”  

Lindke was more effusive and told ABC News that he was “ecstatic” with the court’s decision.   

“A 9-0 decision is very decisive and is a clear indicator that public officials cannot hide behind personal social media accounts when discussing official business,” said Lindke.  

Legal experts called attention to the persistence of gray area in the law regarding social media due to the narrowness of the court’s decision. 

“This case doesn’t tell us much new about how to understand the liability of the 20 million people who work in local, state, administrative or federal government in the U.S. … just that the question is complicated,” Kate Klonick, an expert on online-platform regulation who teaches at St. John’s Law School, told The Washington Post 

Katie Fallow, senior counsel for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University,  told the Post that the court’s ruling does not sufficiently address public officials’ widespread use of personal “shadow accounts,” which constituents often perceive as official.  

Fallow said the court was “right to hold that public officials can’t immunize themselves from First Amendment liability merely by using their personal accounts to conduct official business.”  

We are disappointed, though, that the Court did not adopt the more practical test used by the majority of the courts of appeals, which appropriately balanced the free speech interests of public officials with those of the people who want to speak to them on their social media accounts. 

According to The Hill, the Biden administration and a bipartisan group of 17 states and National Republican Senatorial Committee sided with officials, arguing in favor of their blocks, while the ACLU backed the cons 

Friday’s ruling is only the first of several this term that deal with the relationship between government and social media.

“On Feb. 26, the justices heard argument[s] in a pair of challenges to controversial laws in Florida and Texas that seek to regulate large social-media companies,” explained Amy Howe on Scotusblog.com.  “And on Monday the justices will hear oral arguments in a dispute alleging that the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to remove false or misleading content. Decisions in those cases are expected by summer.” 

COVID-19

Kenyan doctor: WHO pandemic treaty aims to ‘maim and kill’ and ‘establish a one-world government’

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From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

Dr. Wahome Ngare pointed out that there is a history of population reduction efforts in Africa despite the fact that the country is not overpopulated, saying, ‘The problem is greedy global corporate owners who are interested in appropriating our natural resources.’

A Kenyan doctor declared last week that the globalist World Health Organization (WHO)’s proposed “Pandemic Accord” treaty aims to pave the way for a new lethal man-made virus and vaccine, as well as establish a global government by undermining national sovereignty.

Dr. Wahome Ngare explained before the Second African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values & Sovereignty that the real purpose of the pending treaty, which would achieve unprecedented medical control of the WHO over all of its member nations, is depopulation.

He pointed out that there is a substantial history of population reduction efforts in Africa despite the fact that it is demonstrably not overpopulated. To drive this home, he explained that the land mass of Africa can fit that of the U.S., China, India, and Japan but contains only about a fourth of the population of all of those countries combined.

“The problem with Africa is not its growing population, (which) is actually an asset. The problem is greedy global corporate owners who are interested in appropriating our natural resources,” Dr. Ngare said.

The doctor maintains that there are ongoing efforts to reduce the population on the continent through war, famine, disease, and even genetically modified organisms (GMOs), explaining, “The biggest problem with GMO is that the seed is patented — it is owned by someone. And once you use it long enough and your natural seed has disappeared, they can withdraw their seed and kill you through hunger.” In fact, Bill Gates-backed initiatives in Africa have pushed GMO crops for years, under the pretext that it will “end starvation in Africa.”

Dr. Ngare went on to make the case that the COVID-19 outbreak was deliberately used to depopulate the world, including Africa, and that this was only a prelude to what is planned to follow this next WHO Pandemic Accord.

During COVID-19, he noted, people were told that a “frightening” number would die from the virus, and that the disease was untreatable, and that “natural immunity cannot protect us and save us.”

“We were told not to shake hands, we were told not to social distance, we were told to stay at home … If you were given this psychological torture for six months and then you were told there was a vaccine, what would you do? You would run for the vaccine!” Dr. Ngare said.

Vaccination then “became mandatory through coercion,” because evidence of vaccination was needed in order to access goods and services, said Dr. Ngare, suggesting that this showed that “The end game of the whole covid fiasco was to vaccinate everybody … That is what COVID was about.”

For one, only the manufacturers knew what exactly was in the vaccines, and only the laboratories involved in creating them were permitted to test and examine these vaccines.

The supposed basis of their usefulness was also based on an erroneous foundation, Dr. Ngare declared, because the spike protein created by the vaccine was modeled after the very same protein that caused disease in COVID-19.

The shot was also pushed along with the assertion that natural immunity is not protective — and yet, the very vaccine was based on the body’s ability to “mount an immune response to the pathogen!”

Worse, data from the jab trials released by a court order in the U.S. revealed a disturbing amount of death and injury caused at least by the Pfizer shot. According to Dr. Ngare, 61 people died from strokes and five people died from liver damage during the trials, while 80% of pregnant mothers lost their babies during the first three months of pregnancy after being injected with the COVID shots. Moreover, harm was inflicted on both men and women’s reproductive systems by the shots, which harmed sperm count and motility, ovaries, menstrual cycles and placentas.

“This was known during the time of registration of the vaccines, but was not known by doctors,” Dr. Ngare said.

He went on to tell how in Africa there has long been a precedent of imposing unnecessary vaccines, as well as even pushing vaccines that harmed fertility, particularly through the tetanus shot.

According to Dr. Ngare, during the campaign to eradicate tetanus in Africa, females from age 14 to 49 were vaccinated every six months for tetanus, with shots that were in fact contraceptives, unbeknown to the women. This shot was intentionally designed and developed by the U.N, W.H.O., and World Bank to reduce fertility, he added.

The doctor asserted that a paper has been published demonstrating the contraceptive nature of these tetanus vaccines, which has been read over 300,000 times.

Dr. Ngare suggested that these efforts to depopulate Africa and the world through vaccines are precedents for an upcoming depopulation campaign to be initiated through the Pandemic Accord treaty.

The amendments to the international health regulations (IHR) that are part and parcel of the treaty will determine how the WHO would manage pandemics, or diseases that cross country borders, according to Dr. Ngare.

“The WHO is seeking to increase its powers so that the Director General can unilaterally declare that there is a pandemic, whether real or imagined,” Dr. Ngare said. “The minute he pronounces that, the new regulations would allow him to take charge of pandemic management in every country that is a signatory to WHO.”

“It is director Tedros who will say when you will lock down, whether you can ever go to work, which vaccines you’ll be given,” he explained.

“If the WHO causes so much damage with its current power, can you imagine what it would do if you actually gave it more power?” he continued.

“My conclusion is (that) the WHO is no longer a health-promoting body. It has become an imperialism arm of global corporate interests,” he said, adding that the proposed pandemic treaty and IHRs “aim to give the WHO the legal mandate to facilitate the creation of new pandemic … using new man-made viruses, and (the) use of vaccinations as a counter-measure, both designed to reduce the world population through reducing fertility, maiming and killing.”

“It will also give the WHO the mandate to use the pandemics to establish a one-world government by totally obliterating the sovereignty of member states and countries and eroding the citizens’ individual liberties,” he warned.

He urged African nations to avoid this immense harm by first writing “formally to the WHO” to reject the amendments and IHRs, and then to “consider exiting the WHO by 2024, which is when the pandemic treaty is supposed to come into force.”

The doctor also called on African countries to “collectively call for an end to gain-of-function research,” which described as both absurd and extremely dangerous.

“African countries should take a step and say, it is criminal for anybody to train viruses and bacteria to attack human beings as a way of creating a vaccine just in case that virus escapes,” he said. “That is witchcraft. It is not medicine.”

He also advised African countries to “collectively treat all vaccination programs as a national security risk,” stating, “If you cannot determine what is in the vaccine that is being given to your people, you may be opening a door to destroy the African population.”

Finally, Dr. Ngare urged African nations to “reject any linking of individual health records, including vaccination records, to the digital ID that is now being forced” on them.

“Honorable members, do not allow the government to access private health information as a means to determine who will get health services or not. It is medically unethical and it is against basic human rights,” he said.

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espionage

EXCLUSIVE: House Committee To Investigate Spike In Chinese Illegal Immigration Following DCNF Report

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By PHILIP LENCZYCKI

 

Dan Bishop, chair of the subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability, told the DCNF that a “wide-open border presents a ripe opportunity for the [Chinese Communist Party] to undermine our national security.”

A House committee is scheduled to examine the historic surge in Chinese illegal immigration next week, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

The House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability will hold a hearing on Thursday concerning the roughly 8,000% increase in Chinese illegal immigration the U.S. has experienced since March 2021, a committee spokesperson told the DCNF. The DCNF recently revealed an internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) email showing that the Biden administration dramatically simplified the vetting process for Chinese illegal immigrants in April 2023, which has increased the speed of Chinese illegal immigrants entering the country.

The CBP email directed Border Patrol agents to reduce the 40 questions they were required to ask Chinese illegal immigrants down to just five “basic questions” concerning their “Military Service,” “Universities,” “POB/Region,” “Employment” and “Political Party.”

North Carolina Republican Rep. Dan Bishop, chair of the subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability, told the DCNF that a “wide-open border presents a ripe opportunity for the [Chinese Communist Party] to undermine our national security.”

“This dramatic surge calls for intense scrutiny — especially as Border Patrol agents have been instructed to decrease vetting for Chinese nationals in order to process them into the country faster,” Bishop said. “As the CCP continues its quest for geopolitical dominance and threatens our sovereignty, we must examine the risks presented by releasing ever-increasing numbers of minimally-vetted Chinese nationals into our communities.”

U.S. authorities have encountered 24,376 Chinese nationals at the southwest border in fiscal year 2024 alone, according to the committee. In February 2024, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution condemning the Biden administration’s immigration policies, citing the national security threat posed by “Chinese military-aged men” entering the country illegally, the DCNF reported.

Ammon Blair, a former Border Patrol agent and Army veteran, told the DCNF that “being a Border Patrol agent during the surge in Chinese illegal aliens felt like confronting a scene from ‘Red Dawn.’”

“Gradually, it appeared that our role was being coerced by current administration policies, from honorably defending our borders to paradoxically laying down a ‘Silk Road’ for our adversaries,” said Blair, who now works as senior fellow for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “This evolution in policy seems complicit in the CCP invasion and their embedded threats like cyber warfare, drug warfare with Mexican cartel proxies, and economic destabilization.”

The simplification of the vetting process for Chinese illegal immigrants and other Biden administration policies have “created pitch-perfect conditions” for “the infiltration of Chinese agents of espionage,” Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center For Immigration Studies, told the DCNF.

“Intelligence community assessments show that China intends to ramp up espionage and political suppression campaigns in the coming years inside the U.S. and will need an expanded labor force for the effort,” said Bensman, who is one of three experts scheduled to testify during Thursday’s hearing.

Bensman’s testimony will feature photos of identification cards and passports discarded by Chinese illegal immigrants just after crossing the U.S. southern border, a committee source told the DCNF.

Cory Gautereaux, a small business owner and veteran living near the San Diego border, collected those discarded materials and shared them with Bensman.

Gautereaux told the DCNF that he believes Chinese illegal immigration is a “serious national security threat.”

“If they are discarding their IDs and hiding their identity there is a reason,” Gautereaux said. “Since our elected leaders are reluctant to visit the border, I’ll be glad to physically deliver these items to Washington and testify to what I’ve seen.”

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